Energy Department: Standard inertia

Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, March 4, 2007

With all the talk of global warming -- "An Inconvenient Truth" even won an Oscar -- it's appalling where we are with our energy savings rules.

Lost track of that little issue, have you? Don't fret. There's not much to keep track of because the Department of Energy has done almost nothing on the matter, missing all 34 congressional deadlines for updating energy standards for appliances and household products.

The Government Accountability Office issued a report showing only 11 of the standards have been completed -- two were less than a year late, four were one to five years late, five were as much as a decade late. The rest are incomplete, with a dozen being as many as 15 years past deadline.

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Only after being sued by environmental groups did the Department of Energy agree to shake a leg and try to complete new standards for nearly 24 appliances in the next five years. The GAO figures that even if some deadlines had been met, Americans would save $28 billion in energy costs over the next 23 years. The Wall Street Journal reports that the DOE also wasted $10 billion from 1980 through 1996 on incomplete programs.

Apparently sheer inertia has kept DOE folks in their jobs, because we can't imagine how the annual employee evaluations must go there, where the average salary for a midlevel engineer (one in the D.C. area) runs about $79,000 to $103,000, and supervisory positions start at around $110,000. Nice salaries. Maybe they'll do more to earn them.